After seeing Michel Hazanavicius’s exuberant and playful French silent movie “The Artist,” I found myself thinking of Louise Brooks’s back—her bare back, which she employed to such devastating dramatic effect as Lulu, in “Pandora’s Box” (1929), the German silent movie that made her an icon in the history of erotic cinema. I thought as well of Douglas Fairbanks’s satirical gymnastic shenanigans, of Greta Garbo’s heavy-lidded sullenness, of Emil Jannings’s tragic despair. In “The Artist,” there is nothing close to the intensity of the work of those actors. The movie’s principals—Jean Dujardin, as George Valentin, a swaggering silent-movie idol who is ruined by the advent of sound, and Bérénice Bejo, as Peppy Miller, the girl from nowhere who loves him and becomes a star herself—are eager, likable performers. But both characters, and both actors, move in a straight line in each scene; they stay within a single mood. The great silent actors did so much more.

The silent cinema hit the world like a hurricane, destroying élite notions of culture overnight. As a feature-length art form, it lasted less than twenty years, from 1912 to 1929, yet more than ten thousand features were made in that period in the United States alone. From the beginning, the silent cinema was an art devoted to physical risk and to primitive passions, to rage, lust, ambition, and obsession (silence made emotions more extreme in many ways), and it produced obsession in its huge audience. I’m hardly the first man to worship at the shrine of Louise Brooks’s careless but overwhelming appeal. “The Artist,” a likable spoof, doesn’t acknowledge that world of heroic ambition and madness—it’s bland, sexless, and too simple. For all its genuine charm, it left me restless and dissatisfied, dreaming of those wilder and grander movies.

We should be happy that “The Artist” exists at all, of course. Even after being nominated for ten Oscars and winning numerous awards from critics’ groups and the guilds, the film still seems arbitrary—one of those freaks of idealism which sometimes occur in the movies. And yet Martin Scorsese brought out “Hugo,” nominated for eleven Academy Awards, at the same time. Here we have, side by side, a French silent film about Hollywood and a Hollywood movie set in nineteen-thirties Paris, with extended flashbacks to the beginnings of French silent film. In “Hugo,” Scorsese lovingly re-creates the glass studio in which the director Georges Méliès wrought miracles, and the legendary 1896 Lumière Brothers screening at which audience members, panicked by the sight of a train rushing toward them, bolted from their seats. Scorsese celebrates the cinema as provocation, as revolution. Even in flashback, the momentousness of the early days comes through.

Does this coincidence portend anything—a silent-cinema revival? It would be nice to think so. A fair number of the classic films are available from Kino and other DVD distributors, often in crisp, detail-rich transfers. Scholars, museums, and revival houses do their share of missionary work. The Web site silentsaregolden.com keeps track of screenings around the country. Next month, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which occurs annually in July but sponsors events throughout the year, is screening Abel Gance’s restored epic “Napoléon” (1927)—its first showing in the United States since 1981, when Francis Ford Coppola put it on at Radio City Music Hall, an awe-inspiring occasion that people still talk about. This screening—with additional footage restored by the film historian Kevin Brownlow and a fresh score by Carl Davis—will be staged at Oakland’s gold-and-magenta Art Deco Paramount Theatre, a fitting site for grandeur.

This month in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, which regularly shows silent movies, resumes its series “Cruel and Unusual Comedy,” featuring outlandish clowning in foreign silent films. Film Forum just concluded an eleven-week series of M-G-M classics. I caught King Vidor’s “The Patsy” (1928), starring Marion Davies, who was slandered during her lifetime as a no-talent plaything of William Randolph Hearst (she was his mistress for three decades). But Davies was actually something like the Carol Burnett or the Kristen Wiig of her day, an immensely likable comedienne and satirist. At Film Forum, the pianist Steve Sterner played his own score; the theatre was sold out and the audience was rapt, an ardent mood utterly different from the over-stimulated but under-satisfied digital dyspepsia of the malls. Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s repertory director, told me, “I always love putting on silent films, because it becomes a theatrical event.” But Goldstein doesn’t see any large-scale revival ahead. I’m not sure I do, either. Getting audiences to enjoy silent drama (the comedies are not a problem) can be a tough job. “The Artist” shrewdly negotiates just how much of the silent cinema a modern audience can take.

Silent film is another country. They speak another language there—a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty. The language is all the more difficult to understand because most of us haven’t seen silent movies as they were meant to be seen. In the early years, they were shot with hand-cranked cameras at varying speeds—sixteen or eighteen frames per second was roughly the norm—and projected a little faster. By the late twenties, they were often shot at higher frame rates. For those movies, a projection speed of about twenty-two frames a second is right. But, starting in the nineteen-thirties, music soundtracks were added to silents, and the films needed to move through the projector at twenty-four frames a second, so that the optical sound reader could handle the music track. Those versions were what people saw in film classes, revival houses, and on television. But when everything is speeded up too much the uncanny physical precision of the comedies seems helter-skelter and quaint. (Pauline Kael called a public-television series of silent films that were played too fast “the worst crime ever perpetrated against our movie inheritance.”) At the wrong speed, romance or drama may come off well enough in pensive moments, but then a character, reaching a decision, will suddenly race down the stairs like an excited spaniel. The mood is shattered.

Seen properly, the best early movies were a revelation, particularly the sight of actors in closeup—filling a screen fifty feet or more across the diagonal, they presented a new landscape of flesh that astonished viewers. Faces that large might have appeared on billboards, but they didn’t move—they didn’t tremble like a field of grain or surge like the sea. In the nineteen-fifties, Roland Barthes attended a revival of Garbo’s films in Paris, and he evoked what the original experience must have been like:

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.

Barthes was not given to extravagance, yet he was not exaggerating Garbo’s effect on the audience. In 1923, a year before she had her first starring role, the Hungarian critic, theorist, screenwriter, and librettist Béla Balázs described the cinema as marking nothing less than the rebirth of the human in art. In literature, the body was confined to ordered pages of type. Now, in movies, the word became flesh. And Balázs explicitly praised silence as necessary for the highest achievement:

The gestures of visual man [i.e., the film actor] are not intended to convey concepts which can be expressed in words, but such inner experiences, such non-rational emotions which would still remain unexpressed when everything that can be told has been told.

A daunting remark. Is it true? There’s no doubt that film, by using methods special to itself—editing techniques such as cutting from one face in closeup to another and prolonging climactic moments—gave an actor a super-expressive power. It could turn him into a larger-than-life metaphor, a quintessence of a mental or spiritual state that, as Balázs says, lies beyond words, just as music lies beyond words. The stories of silent drama may often have been elemental, yet, within the broad outlines, the artists among the actors could bring out shadings that had no immediate analogue in language. The ineffable had been re-introduced into art.

If you watch a lot of silent films, how ever, you will find yourself forced to qualify Balázs’s prescription. Great acting was hardly a commonplace. It isn’t today, either, but in silent movies actors had to be physically expressive, and that posed a problem. In sound films, an actor with a decent presence or a good voice or a lilting or insinuating manner can succeed just by relaxing onscreen. In the silents, you have to do something; you can’t just be. Silent-film acting drew on the heroic and melodramatic traditions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century theatre; it drew as well on mime, magic shows, and vaudeville. (Scorsese, in his re-creation of Méliès’s studio, dramatizes the magic-show origins with exultant merriment.) Subtlety was not a high priority in those arts. Some of the silent actors were theatre- or vaudeville-trained, some were just good-looking people who were drawn to Hollywood, and did what they were told to do or imagined that they needed to do. D. W. Griffith understood what might go wrong, and taught his actors to minimize their gestures. His films stand out for the eloquence of the playing. In the work of many other directors, however, when the camera moves in close you can see actors popping their eyes and overemphasizing gestures into large, generalized states (boiling rage, dawning awareness) rather than presenting the subtilized emotions that Balázs was talking about. Or they expend so much energy in containing an explosion (trembling in suppression) that they look as if they were having a stroke.

One reason that silent comedies now often come off better (even at the wrong speed) than the serious films is that the principal relationship they dramatize is not between man and woman, or between man and man, but between man and a universe of objects; emotion is less important than survival in an absurd and hostile world. When the comics weren’t dodging motorcycles or Murphy beds or the gears of a factory, they could calm down. Buster Keaton went deadpan, altering his expression with only the tiniest of inflections, and became a modernist icon of fortitude. Time has turned a particular acting convention—a stylistic choice produced by Keaton’s temperament and music-hall experience—into a universal philosophical statement.

Even among the silent overactors, there were hams and there were hams, and the best of them, like John Barrymore and Lon Chaney, were so detailed and idiosyncratic in their miming that they could come close—at least, in grotesque versions—to the wonder that Balázs hoped for. Barrymore came from a theatrical family, and when he enters a room in a silent film, shoulders back, noble nose forward, eyes slightly shadowed, he doesn’t seem like any particular character; he seems simply like an actor, with the weight of the nineteenth-century Shakespeareans upon his shoulders. He is so striking physically—tall and broad—and so self-confident in his projection of himself that he transcends embarrassment. In “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1920), when Barrymore swallows Jekyll’s potion, he staggers, flings back his head, grabs his throat, and collapses. Then he rises, like some weird sea creature from the deep, his pupils disappear, and he somehow makes his hair bristle like quills. His transformation is a continuous physical paroxysm. Silence made it easier to reach the extremes.

Lon Chaney was thrown into extremity from the beginning. His parents were both deaf; as a child, he learned to mime for them, to break through the enclosure of silence, and he exploited silence ever after. He became world-famous playing the malformed in such movies as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1923) and “The Phantom of the Opera” (1925). Chaney was actually slender and graceful; perhaps he felt he understood the inner nobility of God’s more unfortunate creatures. In “Phantom,” the young opera singer pulls off his mask, revealing the withered skin, the stunted nose, and the agonized eyes—still the most famous horror image in all cinema. Chaney opens his mouth in fury and dismay, and then, for the rest of the movie, alternates between menacing the girl and feeling the deepest shame. In recent decades, as horror has become bloody, grisly, and flamboyant, filmmakers have detached us from emotion; they’ve turned horror into sawed-limb, campy fun. But Chaney, by joining horror to suffering, made it an aspect of life; deformity was just another possibility of our physical nature. The absence of shrieks and clanking sound effects helps imprint the image of that face onto our souls.

Film stocks were fairly insensitive in the silent period, and enormous amounts of light were needed to get a proper image. The men and women who became romantic stars were young, with perfect skin that could withstand the high-powered illumination. They had saucer eyes, with very white whites, and perfect teeth (not so easy to come by ninety years ago). The leading men had aquiline noses; the women bowed lips. In 1920, a profile and a figure qualified a performer as much as mimetic talent. And actors had to wear elaborate costumes well. Silence often drove scenarists and producers to the lavish and the exotic—period dramas, royal fantasies, Ruritanian romances—where words mattered less than spectacle, and the actors had to either embrace it or upend it. One way of looking at silent comedy is that it stripped the fat from the corned beef. In “The Patsy,” Marion Davies, trying to rouse the interest of a handsome, sleepy drunk, parodies for his pleasure three actresses—Mae Murray, of the curled lips, fluttery Lillian Gish, and sexy, tempestuous Pola Negri. Each parody is both critique and homage. In “The Artist,” Bérénice Bejo’s character is a swell girl, full of bounce, and compassionate and loyal, too, but Bejo lacks the impress of temperament—as does Jean Dujardin—that made the old stars so memorable. She has one fine, soulful moment, when Peppy slips her arm into the sleeve of Valentin’s jacket and wraps it around herself as if he were embracing her. But we miss the spark of rebellion and wit.

Douglas Fairbanks—after Charlie Chaplin the most popular male star in silent cinema—had a sense of the absurd that helped him triumph over the claptrap. A muscular, athletic man, he was shirtless in much of Raoul Walsh’s “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924), with tight-fitting trunks and loose, polka-dotted pantaloons stretching to his ankles. The picture is an outrageous Orientalist fantasia, set in an Art Deco ancient capital; Fairbanks, a boy in a man’s body, climbs, leaps, and swings his way through the vast sets. Again and again, he grins and throws up his arms like a circus performer, glorying in his own feats. He may not have conveyed the spiritual significance that Balázs spoke of, but his physical exuberance was so beautifully madcap, and so bizarrely beside the point in plot terms, that it became an end in itself; it couldn’t be translated into mere words. And it was a product of silence: in a sound film, a reason would have to be given for all the nutty things he does.

Dujardin, with a pencil mustache, looks a little like John Gilbert, but his cavorting star is meant to be a Fairbanks equivalent. A chesty, full-bodied man who moves quickly, Dujardin is good at buoyant peacocking, as when he shows off to an appreciative audience at the première of one of Valentin’s films. His strongest acting comes early in “The Artist,” when Valentin is shooting a movie, and, in take after take, sets his face in a scowl, as he moves across a dance floor, only to become entranced with Peppy. When he takes her in his arms, he blows the shot. But most of what Dujardin does is obvious and broad. He smiles fatuously; he grimaces when things go wrong.

For a while, Rudolph Valentino, who seems to have given his name (though nothing else) to Valentin, was almost as big a sensation as Fairbanks. Half male beauty, half buffoon, he grinned and widened his eyes as if he were trying to expel them from his head. He was an insistent sexual presence in such films as “The Sheik” (1921)—sheathed in robes and turbans, he still seems naked—but he was a dreadful actor. The gap between the sublime and the terrible, between an original language and haplessness, is at the center of “Flesh and the Devil” (1926), with Greta Garbo as the adulterous lover of John Gilbert. Gilbert has a fine moment in the renowned kissing-in-the-garden scene. He presents his profile, and, more important, his mouth, to Garbo, who knows what to do with it. In the remainder of the movie, Gilbert often falls into a kind of tragic gloom, a dull, dark seriousness of the eyebrows and forehead; he is laborious and earnest without suggesting anything in particular. He struggled, of course, against the same limitations as every actor did in the silent period. Brief inter-titles weren’t good at making complicated meanings clear; in those few words, ambiguity, for instance, couldn’t be more than barely suggested. Almost by necessity, silent acting was devoted to dramatizing the unconscious—hidden lust, the struggles between desire and principle, between one loyalty and another. In film after film, we have to wait without words for a character to make up his mind to do something, and even at a faster speed the wait can seem interminable. Gilbert, an inept master of meaningless prolongation, failed in the sound period, as everyone knows, because his voice was too high, but, as the film historian David Thomson has noted, he wasn’t much of an actor in any kind of movie.

Then, there is Gilbert’s partner in “Flesh and the Devil.” The cinematographer William Daniels, who shot many of Garbo’s movies, says that the actress needed to be photographed either in closeup or in long shot, most likely because he thought her big, wide-hipped, flat-chested body awkward, even a little clumsy. Maybe so, but the way she moves in medium shot—flinging her arms around in despair or striding across a room as if it were an open field—is startling in its abandon. Yet her most stunning attribute was subtlety. The director Clarence Brown, who worked with her on “Flesh and the Devil” and other movies, said that, standing on the set, he couldn’t see her acting at all. But the rushes revealed momentous little shifts in her expression. “What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober,” Kenneth Tynan wrote. It didn’t take much to produce that sober exhilaration: Garbo lowers her head to look calculating; or flutters her lips. Her face darkens with a slight tightening around the eyes and mouth; she registers a passing idea with a contraction of her brows or a drooping of her lids. Worlds turned on her movements, an example of the eloquence that Balázs was hoping for, and which Barthes later evoked—the infinite workings of the unconscious in the form of idealized beauty. And Garbo had a sense of humor as well, which has been insufficiently recognized. Her adulteress in “Flesh and the Devil” is amusingly selfish. After her husband, whom she doesn’t care about, is killed in a duel with Gilbert, she smiles coquettishly at her image in a mirror as she tries on a large black hat to wear to the funeral.

Lillian Gish, for all her justly celebrated spirituality, had subversive moments, too. In “The Scarlet Letter” (1926), made in Hollywood under the direction of the Swedish master Victor Sjöström, Gish’s Hester Prynne rips off the scarlet “A,” removes her cap, shakes loose a magnificent pile of hair, and, just for a second, primps. She is no less dignified and brave for that moment; the touch of vanity eliminates the distance between her and us. The boldest silent acting always burrowed under the outlines of the story and added a layer of commentary, sometimes a dissonant layer. In G. W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box,” the sight of Louise Brooks’s shimmering back overwhelms her straying, wealthy lover, and, in a burst of instinctive, animal joy, she seals the triumph with a small, wicked smile.

In the annual, routinized procession of contemporary movies—thrillers, teen horror films, digital spectacles—“The Artist” stands out as a fresh piece of work. Hazanavicius plays with our sense of how odd silence is; he intrudes sound like a stealthy predator into the bizarre, immaculate world of noiselessness. In the movie’s most striking sequence, Valentin has a nightmare: he dreams of a sounding world, but he cannot speak—his screams come out as dry heaves. But, apart from a few such brilliant bursts of invention, “The Artist” is an amiably accomplished stunt that pats silent film on the head and then escorts it back into the archive. The silent movies we see in “The Artist” all look like trivial, japish romps. (“Singin’ in the Rain” teased the silents the same way, sixty years ago.) Certainly, there’s no art form on display whose disappearance anyone would mourn. Hazanavicius’s jokes are playful but minor, even a little fussy, and after a while I began to think that the knowing style congratulates the audience on getting the gags rather than giving it any kind of powerful experience. “The Artist” lacks the extraordinary atmosphere of the silent cinema, the long, sinuous tracking shots, the intimacy with shadow and darkness. Well, you say, so what? The movie is just a high-spirited spoof. Yes, but why set one’s ambitions so low? The movie’s winningness feels paper-thin, and, as Peter Rainer pointed out in the Christian Science Monitor, “The Artist,” with its bright, glossy appearance, looks more like a nineteen-forties Hollywood production than like a silent movie.

What charms audiences about this genteel film may be the kind of gracious, caring, and well-groomed behavior that Hazanavicius has put on the screen. As far as we can tell, Valentin and Peppy are not lovers. The movie is a sweet, chaste dream of good will, but silent movies were not about good will and restraint. Given their wordlessness, they couldn’t be. In F. W. Murnau’s “The Last Laugh” (1924), the bearish Emil Jannings plays an aging doorman at a magnificent Berlin hotel who loses his job and is consigned to a basement lavatory as an attendant. When he first sees his replacement, he goes into a kind of trance. He’s stunned; his body slumps slightly. A bellboy arrives to bring him to the manager’s office, and Jannings, still in a state of shock, gently strokes him, as if he were consoling him. How strange! He displaces the grief and the shame he feels onto the bellboy. That act, like those moments from Garbo, Gish, and Brooks, suggests a vein of contrariness and complication, the astonishments of art. When silent-movie acting is great, it risks everything. ♦

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